Hello, this is the San Francisco Open Mic Poetry Podcast TV show with John Rhodes and
Clara Sue and today we have on Diane Moomey and in my segment and in Clara's segment we
have QR Hand. Clara will go into more detail about QR in her segment. Diane has published
three or four books now.
This is the fourth book.
This is the fourth book.
Yes, Figure in a Landscape.
And this is called Figure in a Landscape.
And her poems are generally about people and places and the nature of the places.
How would you describe that?
It's about the interface between human and nature.
They're not purely nature poems because the observer is in nature.
They're almost like memories.
In a way, but it's trying to grow a relationship.
My effort to try to grow a relationship with nature and where you are and my place in it.
Sort of like Feng Shui or something?
I love, yes, I love Feng Shui, yes, poetic Feng Shui, that sounds good.
Okay, so I guess we'll cut this clip here now and we'll move around and Diane will
read her poems.
Hi, I'm Diane Lumie and I'm reading some poems out of my book Figure in a Landscape
about the interface between self and nature and my efforts to find my way with that.
The first poem is The Red Hour, located in the town of El Granada near the California
coast where I live now.
Not an hour, not truly, not even half.
In fact, she nearly missed the whole show by turning seaworth and tranced by that western
sun just sliding behind the water, nearly missed red, hoping to catch the green flash
they all talk about.
The Red Hour, not an hour, though the earth does stop for a breath or two, stops while
the eucalyptus grove on the other side of the coast road turns that max-field red, that
copper-filled gold so loved when art was still movable, stops while that red sweeps silently
from trunk to tops and grays into dust.
And she would have missed red, but for a noise from the road behind her, a shout, the slam
of a corridor, a suddenness that turned her face frowning to the east.
And there it was, subvers.
Wild things come down from dry hills to land on the looms, and a ginger cat slinks beneath
the hedge.
Somewhere in the village, a staple has worked loose from wire netting.
Rabbits, restless, rustle their bedding, and wild things come down from the hills, take
cover between garage and garbage cans.
On a patio, drip lines curve from pot to pot, seledon frogs cross-craft earth to slide beneath
the Aspidistra, roses vine between houses, black-tailed deer take refuge.
Wild things waltz from the dark beneath porches, chickens seek the safety of the streets.
This poem goes back to a time of living in a farmhouse north of Lake Ontario.
That was a summer we danced naked rings around the silo they never used, our beads, our smoke.
Our rented farmhouse and island, cornways tickling our shoreline, danced naked while
the growers of corn flew low and dusted.
That spring Ralph Palmer and his sons had harrowed up, furrowed down, put one hundred
acres into barley.
It was early, and winter, not knowing its place, returned for four days to plunge the
red line to thirty-one, to thirty, to twenty-nine.
Only dies at twenty-eight, and on the third day Ralph's heart stumbled and fell.
His dog howled all night.
That was the summer we ran naked between the corn rows, ate his fingerling ears, thought
it's feed corn, not table corn, thought the cows won't know if there are a dozen ears
short.
That's what we thought.
Ralph lived on and so did his barley.
That was the summer we danced naked on the lawn, and I wondered when Ralph Palmer had
last danced naked on the lawn, before corn drew his life into neat furrows, into terrible
furrows, when, or if, wondered if corn came to him in his cradle.
If barley tapped him on the shoulder at high school graduation and said, come with me boy,
that sometimes happens.
Barking all night.
They'll bark the stranger bark, those hounds, nip the heels, send trespassers flying, yip
the yip of the trodden tail, or a welcome, where the woof have you been all day.
They'll bark all those they will, we will, and wag as well, but then, oh yes, then one
day comes the long bark, all night the long bark, baying, savoring the rumble in the throat,
the chest.
The long bark, Lord save us all from barking the long bark, from giving voice across the
winter bear fields, in vacant rooms all night, barking all night because the road is empty
and there's nothing else to do.
This is a watercolor poem, my other law, Saturday morning, east window, lightly glazed with snail
trails, illuminates dust, crumbs, a week's debris, glitters on car keys beside the back
door, finches argue over the last of the Niger seed, need I reply to these?
Water is waiting, water and the whitest of paper, thick and soft, as is the brush of
dark hairs and round handle, beside these fresh pots of yellow, of red, of the bluest
of blues in what, what, which might be foam, the exact russet of the gross beak's breast.
Brushes are waiting, the sun in the east window gives light for this.
I'd like to finish up with one of my favorite poems.
When I am old, I will live in the red woods, in mist and deep green shade.
My lover will be with me, two ancients, we will build a treehouse of woven bark, bats
will hang head down in the shadows above, or when I am old, I will live by the southern
ocean, in a round house with seagrass for a door, I'll build it myself, I shall eat
kill.
A grey cat will live with me, a very old grey cat, he will be indifferent to the sea birds
that walk upon my skin.
I'll lie by the water's edge each day and mark the new year by the return of grey whales
from the north.
Thank you.
Hello and thank you Diane for your poetry.
I'm going to read one short poem by Leonard Irving, he's an old guy who lives here in
the Bay Area, or well, he has lived here in the Bay Area, and he used to hang out in
the open mikes.
I don't know whether he's still alive or not, but I think he travels.
He just passed.
Oh, he just passed.
Okay, so my host told me that Leonard just passed, but anyway, at least I get to say
a prayer for him too, so he is Scottish, and he used to travel back and forth between Scotland
here, and this poem is dedicated to the Obama family, and I do a lot of research in DNA,
and back when Tipton, Indiana was a little whistle stop where everybody was related,
we both had a dozen families who lived in the same little town, and we probably relate,
and when I say probably, I'm pretty sure, but I wouldn't say that unless I, and I think
what's wrong with the world is there's all these little mysteries going on with this
Trump thing, and they're trying to tear us down, and I just want to say that, and this
poem is called Driving Through a Scottish Village.
The driver paused to allow seven Goslings resembling small scrub girls in Sunday best
dresses stepping as to geese in single file to cross to the other side of this lost country
road, and for a moment it seemed that all mess of Scotland appeared to pause and watch
and wait as we did in a stone age village beneath the shoulder of a gaunt heathered
hill, ancient as snow with the earth arrested in time of ended then we drove on, and thank
you, and Clara Sue will be next.
Hi, this is Clara Sue co-hosting with John Rose for the San Francisco Open Mic Poetry
Podcast TV show, and today I have QR Han as my guest, and the QR is going to read to
you right now because he needs no introduction.
So here we go, QR Han.
If there's such a thing, I'm kind of an urbanist, not quite an objectivist, and we'll go from
there.
Last modern stew for the ages, a querying age apocalypse now Armageddon at a snail's pace.
What used to be called Chinese water torture, round and round she goes where she stops,
nobody knows.
At the Palestinian grocers, a Southeast Asian man speaks of the circumstances of eating
the heart of a child, better than the napalm one I hear myself saying.
I didn't press him for his circumstances, I feel I already know too much.
Is this denial part of this town and others for the spirited sisters of carnival?
Some getting warmer, crowds still coming, dancing, blood going on and on, this tail end of bacteria
caught up in the high of a long-distance drummer running on hands and sticks, left
to sneakers in the dusts.
Let Trisha's God resplendent in the son of the mission, because she's a metaphysical
gal, she sees the murder of crazy horse over and over, makes conversations that got nothing
to do with the finacelle she's hiding amongst her big, fine and loud lyricisms, shaking
it all the time.
He thinks Haiti's got problems too, leaves a valentious street peacock in quizzical
dementia, breakouts with her cease and desist orders, God not yet baby, these moving pictures
are just locked up, we need to stop.
Ain't no going back to Bikini now.
She be with the Samba de Coracao, her mind photo journals, 360 degrees of distortions.
She be saying, stop this pre-tent, this should be just a drunken rear, and she be shaking
it all the time.
Sounds of Pescovito and his band, sun going down in soft evening air, winds starting
up, troubles in the people's tune, kids making moves in dust swirls, then cops, both all
over, cause she's a metaphysical gal, and she be shaking it all the time, breath and
muscles mattering, disembodiment speaks, embraces, no pursuit, that I am commanded to love beyond
comfort, self and other, even who would kill the child.
She be saying, you gotta tell me you love me or die with a secret, this a conversion
by the sword sweetie, you're not the first man to be robbed, victim.
She be saying, like the man said, this I tell from the hood, chill or be chilled out.
And in another part of time, another part of time, lady I haven't eaten in two days,
it was said, and then it was heard, my good man, you must force yourself to eat.
Sounds of chisels, chiseling means statues and deficits are on the way, but death.
I did a lot of stuff having to do with the Mission District in San Francisco, where
I lived and worked for many, many years, and really enjoyed the place, it was the closest
place to the good-spirited end of what was called the ghetto in Manhattan that had so
much of life to it, which is kind of partially where I grew up, so anyhow, so that spirit
is both on the east and west coast, not places in between too.
Our hemisphere, aqua-calib-latin hillbillies, Semitic-Hammitic, semi-Drividian natives who
might have come from India and shown off being the indies here, those carrying glyphics to
the new world whose old dwellers take to the hills still and teach us to worship there,
black and brown and golden and peach-pink, urban populace, left-wing and anarchistic
universal, quack-quack-versus color-coded, god-headed, new world peoples of every shade
there is and we're making more every day, a class containing classes, the exes and
whys of manifesting humanities, becoming the music of the world containing all excluding none,
let the Klan and the Nazis go back. We all hear now.
Us folks are the peoples who look towards the sea, vision and memory, past, perfect futures,
our tune about our musics like seaweeds on the shore, our eyes, hearts afired, dancing on limbs
aghast and the dazzles caress in these sands and clapping spirits, our souls are numb-less
like bands of the spectra, our cues are numb-less, jump back brothers, see our sisters prancing on
the sea, their curves and spears rounding up the edges of the sands, making the sheets of molten
glisten we are evocations of this sweet liquid strumming on these vibrant far reaches on our
faithful shore, this ritual climate we are on, this shore spelling out the seasons of reason,
numb-less beings grow gills, sprout wings, drunken on the bottom of pink-all reef, then
leap the sea-sailing easy to a far to a star, we are stone reflections of, to view from there
these sands who do not know they are us, not these sands, our foundations on these wheels of things
rolling shore, surf washed, waves yearning to roll and moomers on, these grits are relentless too
in changing forms, numb-less, pastel and pale yellows mixed by the sea, wind, the sun, our constant
companions on this sphere, on this beachhead here, on our minds, and communal heart-mold sands into
cities and ports to welcome from the sea more ancestors to be, to play on this shore notes of
universal hide, seek, time, here is numb-less, we've known not its name, we have the growth here,
we have the trees, we have the creatures here, so it is said on which cosmic bed no wages subsist,
numb-less are the names of this life on these sands, on the dream washed up on these shores,
our spokes are on the peoples who look towards the sea, looking towards the sea, our songs are
the bread of the shore, our spirits, our spawn on these quick sands we name ourselves numb-less.
A little quicky going in this state of the union, I found this in these blues times tunes, beats me
to death can't tell you why she ain't with me, this land of my heart. I'm gonna do one more,
a poem for those who didn't make it this winter whose bones were left in a pile of long waits,
washed away in a rain of official acids, whose eyes rolled like minstrels, sick with st. Vita's
dance and electronic furies that tap into brain cells and nuts for those who didn't make it this
winter, who choked vomiting jagged alphabets of steel and cindered kidneys, swallowing gorgeous
of white teeth, who violated the iron maidens penetrating questions, looked the grand inquisitor
right between his wise, then shit on the floor of the palace of the golden skulls for those who
didn't make it this winter, who waited alone and frayed trousers, shot up with the givens diatribes
in the eyes of narrow metals, whose eyes saw only indivisibly frozen stiff, whose hearts were cubed
for further researchers and whose family trees were bent over to receive the detector's probings
for those who didn't make it this winter, screaming that time of pain has come again to warn the others
as stokes were screwed where their legs used to be and multimedia infusions were jammed into
their arteries, they heard the call of all of their fathers ever for those who didn't make it,
their mothers, brothers, sisters, for those who didn't make it this winter for those
and for us, by the law must fall. Thank you very much.
Thank you Q.R. Han for your reading. I would like to end my segment with a poem titled
The Constitution of Rain. As the view blurs, a man pisses openly in the street with his pants
down. The philosopher asks, what is the Constitution of Rain and goes off into another world,
hot mist rising from the sidewalk, one that has no need for ears or tongue or body or color,
only colorless object may exist in isolation, one that is as detached as a popped cap from a bottle,
purity that contains impurity, impurity that is seemingly pure. She walks in her rain boots and
jacket, hood and umbrella and gloves, not a drop of rain touches her skin. Waiting for the bus,
she watches the back of another man as the rain forms pearls on his sweatshirt, squeezing body
against bodies. When the bus stops, she loses her footing and falls on a girl. I'm sorry the
philosopher apologizes, but the girl is unmoved. Thank you very much for tuning in. My name is
Clara Sue, co-hosting with John Rose for The San Francisco Open Mic Poetry Podcast TV show. See you
next time. Thank you.
